In this episode Amy Climer examines the research on how to build creative teams and provides six actions leaders can take to enhance their team’s creative output.

What You’ll Learn

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Two myths about creativity that are common in teams and business

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Six ways leaders can build creativity in any team

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Three ways to build trust amongst your team

The Weekly Challenge

Which of the six actions can you begin this week with your team? Talk with you team to see which areas they feel are most important. Make one step towards helping your team become more creative.

Upcoming Workshops by Amy Climer

From Conflict to Resolution: Managing and Mediating Conflict at Work – November 6, 2015, Milwaukee, WI

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #019: Six Actions Leaders can take to build Creative Teams

Amy Climer:  Welcome to the Deliberate Creative Podcast episode #019.  On today’s episode, we’re talking about six actions leaders need to take in order to build a creative team.  Of course, you all know me, this is all researched based.  This came out of a research I did a couple of years ago exploring creativity and transformational leadership and what I found is that there are six things that leaders can do that can really make a big difference in helping their team become more creative.

To start, I want to talk actually about two myths I think are pretty prominent out there in regard to leadership and creativity.  The first myth is this idea that creativity is born not made.  People are just naturally creative or they are not.  It’s a total myth.  There have been all these studies about how creativity can be enhanced and built with practice, time, and training.  There’s one study based on twins that show that 78% of our creativity is not genetic.  I was sure a little bit of it is, we all have aptitudes for certain things, but 78% is a lot.  That’s one thing you should know if you’re leading a creative team, sometimes, I think we have the tendency to earmark certain people as creative or not, but actually everybody has incredible capacity to be creative.

The second myth is this idea that we should just leave creative people alone and let them be.  That’s how they are going to be most creative.  I think that comes from the image of the artist working alone in their studio or the scientist tinkering in their lab by themselves.  Actually what research has shown is that yes some of that alone time is important, but also so is the group time and so is that collaboration.  When we’ve looked at highly creative people, what we found is a lot of times they had collaborators all along.  Einstein and Edison are great examples.  Neither of them worked alone.  This idea of leaving Creatives alone and just let them do their thing is a myth, but actually the reality is support and engagement are very important to help creativity flourish.I’m going to provide a little more clarity to help with these myths and there are six things that leaders can do to help lead their teams to a higher state of creativity.  

#1 Build Diverse Teams and Create a Sense of Inclusion

The first of these is design diverse teams and build a sense of inclusion.  Sometimes, we don’t have the opportunity to pick who is on our team and who is not, but sometimes we do.  When you have that opportunity to develop the team from the ground up, diversity is huge and diversity in all sense of the word – this could be people’s background,